Can events that take place after an individual’s death affect that person’s weIl-being? Aristotle apparently thought that they could, but Mark Overvold disagrees. Like other contemporary moral theorists, Overvold analyzes the notion of a person’s utility or welfare in terms of the fulfillment of the individual’s desires, but he adds the important qualification that the desites must be for states-of-affairs in which the agent is an essential constituent. The clear implication of such a view is that our welfare cannot (...) be affected by the post-mortem satisfaction of any of the interests which we had while alive.I shall defend Overvold against his critics who insist that at least some posthumous satisfactions can contribute to a person’s welfare. I shall also argue against Brad Hooker’s proposal that we revise Overvold’s theory in order to account for such cases. (shrink)

Can events that take place after an individual’s death affect that person’s weIl-being? Aristotle apparently thought that they could, but Mark Overvold disagrees. Like other contemporary moral theorists, Overvold analyzes the notion of a person’s utility or welfare in terms of the fulfillment of the individual’s desires, but he adds the important qualification that the desites must be for states-of-affairs in which the agent is an essential constituent. The clear implication of such a view is that our welfare cannot (...) be affected by the post-mortem satisfaction of any of the interests which we had while alive.I shall defend Overvold against his critics who insist that at least some posthumous satisfactions can contribute to a person’s welfare. I shall also argue against Brad Hooker’s proposal that we revise Overvold’s theory in order to account for such cases. (shrink)

We assume that there are certain causes that are morally wrong, worth speaking out against, and working to overcome, e.g., opposition to same sex marriage. This seems to suggest that we should also be boycotting certain businesses; particularly those whose owners advocate such views. Ideally, for the boycotter, this will end up silencing certain views, but this seems to cause two basic problems. First, it appears initially to be coercive, because it threatens the existence of the business. Second, it runs (...) counter to the intuition that we should not force unpopular opinions out of the marketplace of ideas. Boycotting is by its very nature a coercive act, and thus we have to carefully consider what types of actions may warrant this type of coercive action. In this paper, we will argue that an organized boycott is justified if and only if the actions taken by the company have negative consequences that outweigh the negative outcome of the boycott. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in terms of their gender asymmetries – have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men. Our (...) index is based on five main language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three sets of specific features (morphology, masculine-male generics and asymmetries). Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender. (shrink)

Can events that take place after an individual’s death affect that person’s weIl-being? Aristotle apparently thought that they could, but Mark Overvold disagrees. Like other contemporary moral theorists, Overvold analyzes the notion of a person’s utility or welfare in terms of the fulfillment of the individual’s desires, but he adds the important qualification that the desites must be for states-of-affairs in which the agent is an essential constituent. The clear implication of such a view is that our welfare cannot (...) be affected by the post-mortem satisfaction of any of the interests which we had while alive.I shall defend Overvold against his critics who insist that at least some posthumous satisfactions can contribute to a person’s welfare. I shall also argue against Brad Hooker’s proposal that we revise Overvold’s theory in order to account for such cases. (shrink)

Background While prenatal surgery historically was performed exclusively for lethal conditions, today intrauterine surgery is also performed to decrease postnatal disabilities for non-lethal conditions. We sought to describe physicians' attitudes about prenatal surgery for lethal and non-lethal conditions and to elucidate characteristics associated with these attitudes. Methods Survey of 1200 paediatric surgeons, neonatologists and maternal–fetal medicine specialists. Results Of 1176 eligible physicians, 670 responded. In the setting of a lethal condition for which prenatal surgery would likely result in the child (...) surviving with a severe disability, most respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed that they would recommend the surgery. Male physicians were twice as likely to recommend surgery for the lethal condition, as were physicians who believe that abortion is morally wrong. Older physicians were less likely to recommend surgery. For non-lethal conditions, most respondents agreed that they would recommend prenatal surgery, even if the surgery increases the risk of prematurity or fetal death. Compared with MFMs, surgeons were less likely to recommend such surgery, as were physicians not affiliated with a fetal centre, and physicians who were religious. Conclusion Physician’s attitudes about prenatal surgery relate to physicians’ beliefs about disability as well as demographic, cultural and religious characteristics. Given the variety of views, parents are likely to receive different recommendations from their doctors about the preferable treatment choice. (shrink)

This paper responds to the commentaries from Stacy Carter and Alan Cribb. We pick up on two main themes in our response. First, we reflect on how the process of setting standards for empirical bioethics research entails drawing boundaries around what research counts as empirical bioethics research, and we discuss whether the standards agreed in the consensus process draw these boundaries correctly. Second, we expand on the discussion in the original paper of the role and significance of the concept (...) of ‘integrating’ empirical methods and ethical argument as a standard for research practice within empirical bioethics. (shrink)

We consider the varieties and directions of influence that the source and target domains involved in a conceptual metaphor can have on each other during the course of understanding metaphorical utterances based on the metaphor. Previous studies have been restricted both as to direction of influence and as to type of influence. They have been largely confined to the “forward” (source to target) direction of influence, and they have concentrated on the transfer of features or propositions and (to some extent) (...) the highlighting of aspects of a domain. By contrast, this article stresses the importance both of other varieties of influence (e.g., transfer of queries and uncertainty effects) and of “reverse” influence (target to source). We seek to curb the natural tendency to think that, because metaphor involves an overall move from source to target, therefore all inter-domain influences in the course of understanding go in that direction. The bulk of the article explores the theoretical issues involved. These issues have arisen out of a reasoning-based approach to metaphor, seeking to make best use of information from metaphorical utterance, context, source and target domains, and known metaphorical mappings, by applying a complex overall reasoning process. The article briefly explains the thorough implementation of reverse influence in a computer program for metaphorical reasoning called ATT-Meta, although the theoretical considerations are relevant to all disciplines concerned with metaphor. We make some suggestions for further computational and psychological research on metaphor. (shrink)

Contributors: Sabina Leonelli Nancy J. Nersessian Michel Janssen Jacob G. Foster James A. Evans Mark A. Bedau Marshall Abrams Gilbert B. Tostevin Salikoko S. Mufwene Massimo Maiocchi Joseph D. Martin Paul E. Smaldino Claes Andersson Anton Törnberg Petter Törnberg Beyond the Meme assembles interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. The volume demonstrates how a thick understanding of change in culture (...) emerges from multiple disciplinary vantage points, each of which is required to understand cultural evolution in all its complexity. (shrink)

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration (...) is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency. (shrink)

Pluractionality (PLR) is the morphological category that generally signifies multiple actions. This paper, based on original fieldwork, provides the first investigation of PLR in Chechen, a Nakh language spoken in the eastern central part of the North Caucasus. The data reflects the standard dialect of Chechen spoken in and near the cities of Murus-Martan and Grozny. Chechen PLR, which is marked by stem vowel alternations, prototypically signifies the repetition of an event (e.g., saca/sieca `to stop once/many times'; laaca/liica `to catch (...) once/many times'). The plurality of the nominative argument can affect the interpretation of some verbs (e.g., ghitta `to wake up'; hitta `to assume a standing position'), rendering the reading distributive. More interestingly, a durative reading, signaling the prolongation of an event, is available for some verbs (e.g., xouzha/xiizha `to ache momentarily/for a while', zouza/ziiza `to itch momentarily/for a while') but not others. Following Ojeda (1998) and Lasersohn (1995), PLR is accounted for in terms of the pluralization of the event argument of a predicate. The various semantic effects are the results of interactions between the aspectual properties of individual verbs and event pluralization. (shrink)

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines—nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures (...) with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially) generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, when available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those of such marking on subject noun phrases. (shrink)

In Chapter 5 of his book, Res Cogitans, Zeno Vendler argued for the thesis that what we know when we know that p, e.g. that Los Angeles is south of San Francisco, and what we believe when we believe that p cannot be the same despite being expressed in the same words, on the ground that ‘believe’ is what he called a subjective verb and ‘know’ what he called an objective verb. For this he gave two main criteria that subjective (...) verbs can take only ‘subjective that- clauses,’ by which he means clauses which express propositions, whereas objective verbs can take only ‘objective that-clauses,’ by which he means clauses which express facts; that subjective verbs cannot take, whereas objective verbs can take, wh- nominalisations - in practice these are the interrogatives what, who where, when, how - which Vendler also takes as a mark of the objective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:270 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Prophets of Paris. By Frank E. Manuel. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.) This perceptive and sophisticated contribution to the history of ideas is organized around the intellectual biographies of Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simoniarts, Charles Fourier, and Auguste Comte. Professor Manuel's prophets were all Frenchmen and all, he believes, can be placed in a common tradition marked by their conviction that Paris was the (...) mount from which the new gospel had to be delivered, that love was the key to social organization, and that social and religious relationships were more significant than political forms. He presents them as prophets in the Old Testament sense--as unsparing moral critics, teachers and the "revealers of a divine historical design." They were philosophers of an age of crisis, convinced that theirs was the instant of a great human divide and therefore victims "of the anguish of futurity." The future they so confidently foretold to anyone who cared to listen, and to many who did not, has found many of their prophetic visions to be poor predictions, but for Manuel they cannot be dismissed as utopian cranks or frustrated totalitarians. Many of the issues they raised and problems they sensed have yet to be adequately confronted, and it is this prescience, particularly with regard to the psychological conditions of social existence, that Manuel wishes to emphasize. This treatment, as its author admits, is a "frank attempt at rehabilitation, to right the balance of historical judgement and bestow new worth upon thinkers who have often been treated with superficiality" (pp. 1-10). Manuel's approach to the history of ideas lends itself quite effectively to this purpose. He admits to a "romantic view of history-writing" which entails an effort to establish an intimacy with his subjects through an immersion in their manuscripts, in the "scribbled brouillons, the casual notes, the personal letters," as well as in the identity presented through their published works. His writing of history is romantic not only in this regard but much more profoundly in his historicism, which attempts an immediate empathetic confrontation with the total organic complex of his subject's life, ideas, and environment. Manuel's evident sympathy occasionally tempts him into apologetics, but essentially he is not arguing a brief for the defense but trying to understand what it was that made these men see so far, and yet with such myopic arrogance, and what it was they saw. It seemed to me that his approach is most successful with Fourier, and least so with Turgot. Charles Fourier, the self-taught travelling salesman from Besan~on, is often summarily dismissed as a cosmic crank with easy reference to his fantastic aberrations --his seas of lemonade and the copulation of the planets. Manuel helps us to understand not only the aberrations but the prescient insights by establishing the relationship between Fourier's personality and his ideas, as well as by tracing the connections between apparently contradictory conceptions. He does not misuse this technique of intellectual biography by patronizing or justifying a system of thought with reference to its psychological antecedents, but rather helps to illuminate a philosophy by examining the reasons for its expression. This works particularly well with Fourier, an obsessed and deprived personality, whose great contribution, according to Manuel, was the assimilation into a social doctrine of the fundamental needs and drives of mankind--its "manifold wants, its secret desires, and its obstinate fixations" (p. 203). Both Fourier and the SaintSimonians believe that it was pointless to tinker with the social environment without regard for permanent psychological realities, but the latter hoped to sublimate human passions through a social organization that redefined them, while Fourier wanted a social system that would provide for their total gratification (p. 226). Occasionally Manuel rather triumphantly unearths striking parallels with our present BOOK REVIEWS 271 concerns that do not demonstrate the vision of his seers into the future so much as his discovery of analogues in the past. Fourier's case is not particularly strengthened by the observation that his vision of a climate so benign under the regime of phalansteries as to render tire very poles inhabitable is "no longer as... (shrink)

Reacting against the dominance of obligation-based moral theories in both general and nursing ethics, the author proposes a 'strong' (action-guiding) account of a virtue-based approach to moral decision-making within contemporary nursing practice. Merits and criticisms of obligation and virtue-based approaches to morality are identified and examined. One of the author's central premises is that the notions of moral goodness and badness carry more moral weight than the traditionally important notions of moral rightness and wrongness. Therefore, the author argues that in (...) order to deliver morally good care, it is vital to consider the kind of nurse one is and this means examining one's moral character. This book will be rewarding reading for a wide range of readers including clinical nurses, nurse educators and nurse ethicists; indeed, anyone interested in morality and ethics and the work of nurses will find this book stimulating reading. (shrink)

This collection contains the following sixteen essays: "Some Pivotal Issues in Spinoza," by Paul Weiss; "The Deductive Character of Spinoza's Metaphysics," by Michael Hooker; "Spinoza's Ontological Proof," by Willis Doney; "Spinozistic Anomalies," by Jose Benardete; "Some Idealistic Themes in the Ethics," by Robert N. Beck; "Spinoza's Dualism," by Alan Donagan; "Objects, Ideas, and 'Minds': Comments on Spinoza's Theory of Mind," by Margaret D. Wilson; "Parallelism and Complementarity: The Psycho-Physical Problem in the Succession of Niels Bohr," by Hans Jonas; "Spinoza's (...) Political Philosophy: The Lessons and Problems of a Conservative Democrat," by Lewis S. Feuer; "Notes on Spinoza's Critique of Religion," by Hilail Gilden [[sic]] ; "Spinoza and History," by James C. Morrison; "Kant's Critique of Spinoza," by Henry E. Allison; "Hegel's Assessment of Spinoza," by Kenneth L. Schmitz; "Spinoza's Logic of Inquiry: Rationalist or Experientialist?" by Isaac Franck; "De Natura," by Stewart Umphrey; "Analytic and Synthetic Methods in Spinoza's Ethics," by Richard Kennington. (shrink)

A class of problems is called decidable if there is an algorithm which will give the answer to any problem of the class after a finite length of time. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the classes of problems that can be solved by infinitely long decision procedures in the following sense: An algorithm is given which, for any problem of the class, generates an infinitely long sequence of guesses. The problem will be said to be solved in (...) the limit if, after some finite point in the sequence, all the guesses are correct and the same. Functions, sets, and functionals which are decidable by such infinite algorithms will be calledlimiting recursive. These, together with classes of objects which can beidentified in the limit, are the subjects of this report.Without qualification,setwill mean set of numbers;functionwill mean number-theoretic function of 1 variable, possibly partial;functionalswill take numerical values and have any number of numerical and/or function variables, the latter ranging solely over total functions of 1 variable. Thus a function is a special case of a functional,xwill invariably stand for a numerical variable;φfor a function variable;gfor a guess ;nfor the numerical variable which indexes the guesses, referred to as thetime. (shrink)

An organizing framework is set out for the diverse literature on business ethics in relation to strategic management. It consists of sets of bi-polar components, spanning themes and topical themes, with a derived typology of contributions. Then, in the spirit of classical pragmatism, the organizing framework is re-cast as an integrative conceptual model of the strategy–ethics relationship. The approach recognizes that both pragmatism and dialectics can underpin progress towards integration, encompassing both normative and empirical aspects.

Simon Schaffer has published a constructivist analysis of the acceptance of Newton’s theory of color that focuses on Newton’s experiments, the continual controversies over them, and his power and authority. In this article, I show that Schaffer’s account does not agree with the historical evidence. Newton’s theory was accepted much sooner than Schaffer holds, when and in places where Newton had little power; many successfully repeated the experiments and few contested them; and theory mattered more than experiment in acceptance. I (...) also present an alternative account of the acceptance of Newton’s theory that shows that, despite criticism when it was first published in 1672, the theory, or parts of it, gradually came to be accepted by mathematical scientists—including Huygens and Leibniz—and Scottish natural philosophers by the time of the publication of the Opticks in 1704. On the Continent, it was coming to be accepted within a decade or so after its publication, that is, before 1716, when Newton replied to a challenge, purportedly by Leibniz, that Schaffer sees as the crucial conflict that at last gave Newton’s experiments their authority. (shrink)

Illness creates a range of negative emotions in patients including anxiety, fear, powerlessness, and vulnerability. There is much debate on the ‘therapeutic’ or ‘helping’ nurse–patient relationship. However, despite the current agenda regarding patient-centred care, the literature concerning the development of good interpersonal responses and the view that a satisfactory nursing ethics should focus on persons and character traits rather than actions, nursing ethics is dominated by the traditional obligation, act-centred theories such as consequentialism and deontology. I critically examine these theories (...) and the role of duty-based notions in both general ethics and nursing practice. Because of well-established flaws, I conclude that obligation-based moral theories are incomplete and inadequate for nursing practice. I examine the work of Hursthouse on virtue ethics’ action guidance and the v-rules. I argue that the moral virtues and a strong (action-guiding) version of virtue ethics provide a plausible and viable alternative for nursing practice. I develop an account of a virtue-based helping relationship and a virtue-based approach to nursing. The latter is characterized by three features: (1) exercising the moral virtues such as compassion; (2) using judgement; and (3) using moral wisdom, understood to include at least moral perception, moral sensitivity, and moral imagination. Merits and problems of the virtue-based approach are examined. I relate the work of MacIntyre to nursing and I conceive nursing as a practice: nurses who exercise the virtues and seek the internal goods help to sustain the practice of nursing and thus prevent the marginalization of the virtues. The strong practice-based version of virtue ethics proposed is context-dependent, particularist, and relational. Several areas for future philosophical inquiry and empirical nursing research are suggested to develop this account yet further. (shrink)

The rational-agent frame of reference for the analysis of corporate strategic decision-making may be expanded to a moral-agent perspective where decision content is seen as comprising both commercial and ethical factors. Relevant factors may then be classified on the basis of the ethical decision principles to which they relate: rational-egoism, self-referential altruism or deontology. This approach is then applied to the problem of decision support for strategic divestment by MNCs.

Many leading management scientists have advocated ethicalism: the incorporation of social and ethical concerns into traditional "rational" OR-MS techniques and management decisions. In fact, elementary forms of decision analysis can readily be augmented, using ethical theory, in ways that sweep in ethical issues. In addition, alternative conceptual models of Decision-Analysis, Game-Theory and Optimality are now available, all of which have brought OR-MS and Business-Ethics into a closer alignment.

Rowlands defends environmentalism, that is, the conjunction of the ontological claim that cognitive processes are not located exclusively inside the skin of cognizing organisms and the epistemological claim that it is not possible to understand the nature of cognitive processes by focusing exclusively on what is occurring inside the skin of cognizing organisms. Chapter 3 is devoted to explaining how environmentalism differs from other forms of externalism about the mental. The crucial points are that the arguments to be presented for (...) the ontological claim do not turn on considerations about the content of mental states, that environmentalism implies a strong form of externalism, and that standard arguments for externalism, based on considerations about content, do not establish the strong form. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Mill as an Act‐Utilitarian Mill as a Rule‐Utilitarian Moral Rules, Justice, and Supererogation Mill's Theory of the Right and “The Art of Life”.

From a national U.S. sample of senior academic biochemists, ninety-four indicated that they personally knew of an incident of scientific wrongdoing. Among these individuals, less formal actions against an offending individual were endorsed when either actions were believed to have the potential to publicly embarrass the offending individual, or the actions might adversely affect the professional career of the whistleblower. These relationships remain significant after controlling for professional status, career age, and current level of formal departmental administrative responsibility. Study limitations (...) and implications are discussed. (shrink)

We discuss a recent attempt by Chris Daly and Simon Langford to do away with mathematical explanations of physical phenomena. Daly and Langford suggest that mathematics merely indexes parts of the physical world, and on this understanding of the role of mathematics in science, there is no need to countenance mathematical explanation of physical facts. We argue that their strategy is at best a sketch and only looks plausible in simple cases. We also draw attention to how frequently Daly and (...) Langford find themselves in conflict with mathematical and scientific practice. (shrink)

Deep ecology has been criticized for being anti-anthropocentric, ignorant of feminism, and utopian. Most of the arguments against deep ecology, however, are based on uncritical use of these terms. Deep ecology places anthropocentrism, feminism, and utopianism into a proper perspective--deep anthropology-which pennits understanding of the human relationships with other beings in nature, in a total-fieldmodel, without accepting unhealthy extremes. The principles of deep ecology are concerned with creating good places, rather than the “no places” of modem industrial cultures.

Many tensions exist within the nexus of corporate social responsibility, competitive strategy, and political activity. Previously, these aspects of strategic management have been considered in relative isolation or at best in pairs. Accordingly, an attempt is made here to set out a general strategic problem of the corporation, in which all three aspects are combined. This project reveals a particular need to explicate the political assumptions held by or on behalf of the corporation. Examples might include the classical liberal model, (...) global hypercompetition, or variants of the stakeholder model. The project also reinforces the broader notion that when one adopts the perspective of a corporate strategist, one can sometimes find potentially productive ways of reframing issues in ethics, economics, and politics. (shrink)

A set of amino acid side chains that confer specificity for the coenzyme NADPH and the substrate glutathione in the flavoprotein disulphide oxidoreductase, glutathione reductase, has been identified. Systematic replacement of these amino acid residues in the coenzyme‐binding site switches the specificity of the enzyme from its natural strong preference for NADPH to a marked preference For NADH. The amino acids replaced all lie in a structural motif within the dinucleotide‐binding domain of the protein. Since this domain is a feature (...) common to most dehydrogenases (reductases) that use nicotinamide coenzymes, it may be that the coenzyme specificities of all such enzymes can be manipulated in this way. Similarly, amino acid residues involved in the selective recognition of trypanothione by trypanothione reductase, an enzyme related to glutathione reductase and exclusive to trypanosomatids, were identified. Suitable mutation of the corresponding residues in E. coli glutathione reductase switched its substrate specificity towards trypanothione. A better understanding of the substrate specificity of these enzymes could open up a route to the chemotherapy of trypanosomal infections. (shrink)

A new framework-based approach to teaching and analyzing business ethics cases is set out. Using the framework, students are encouraged to adopt two different perspectives: business as usual and a more obviously moral point of view. Subsequently, they are prompted to craft a synthesis or compromise. Several pedagogical benefits flow from adopting the approach, including the cultivation of moral tolerance and improvements in the structure and scope of written action justifications. In addition, the framework enables students to relate ethical theories (...) to the cases in a systematic way, thereby addressing a long-standing concern of business ethics educators. (shrink)